The First General Council of Constantinople, 381
(Chapter 2 of THE CHURCH IN CRISIS: A History of the General Councils, 325-
1870, by Msgr. Philip Hughes.)
The second General Council of the Church, which met at Constantinople in
the year 381, was summoned primarily as a solemn demonstration of the
unshaken loyalty of the eastern bishops to the faith as set forth at
Nicaea, a demonstration that the church of the East had never gone over to
Arianism, that the Arians were no more than a heretical faction--had never
been anything more, despite their power--and were now finally discredited.
Why was such a declaration necessary, fifty-six years after the bishops of
the East, with the enthusiastic support of the all-powerful emperor, had
condemned Arius as a falsifier of the truth and had provided, in the homo-
ousion, a sure touchstone to test the orthodoxy of future bishops? The
answer to this question is one of the strangest an most involved chapters
in all Church History. The simplest way perhaps, to set out as much of it
as is essential to the story of the General Council of 381, will be to list
the turning points of the story, and then attempt some explanation of the
"why" of it all.
On the morrow of the Council of Nicaea three bishops revoked their
signatures to the condemnation of Arius--the bishops of the neighbouring
sees of Nicaea, Nicomedia, and Chalcedon. They were promptly banished by
the emperor, and others elected in their stead (325). In 328 the bishop of
Alexandria died, and the young deacon Athanasius, who had been his main
advisor at the great council, was chosen to succeed him, and despite the
active hostility of the Meletian faction, he was consecrated. That same
year Constantine recalled the exiled bishops and reinstated them--why, we
do not know; it may have been for personal reasons only. From the moment,
until his death in 341, the ex-Lucianist, Eusebius of Nicomedia, becomes
the leading figure in the movement to undo
the work of Nicaea. After the emperor founded his new capital city,
Constantinople, Eusebius became its bishop.
Eusebius never openly attacked the achievement of 325. His line was to work
for the destruction of the leading bishops who had supported the homo-
ousion, on the plea that they were heretics, but of a different kind, i.e.,
men who did not really believe in the Trinity, who by the word homo-ousion
meant that the Father and the Logos were one. The first victim of this
campaign was the second greatest prelate in the empire of the East, the
bishop of Antioch, Eustathius by name. It was, possibly, he who had
presided at Nicaea. A carefully chosen council of bishops now met at
Antioch, condemned and deposed him. And, once again, the emperor followed
up the ecclesiastical judgment by a sentence of exile. Nine other leading
bishops were similarly removed in the course of the next year or so (330-
32). In 332 the intrigue to remove Athanasius began. The agents of this
were the Meletians of Alexandria. The point of attack was not the orthodoxy
of his belief but his loyalty to the emperor. Athanasius was summoned to
the court, and cleared himself easily, returning home with a letter of high
commendation from Constantine. Two further attempts to disgrace him, in the
next two years, also failed.
Then, in 334, Constantine did the most astonishing thing of all--
astonishing to us who know, really, so very little of the day-to-day
history of these events. He recalled Arius from banishment, and received
him at court. And while a council was ordered to "investigate" what we may
call "the Athanasius problem"--why it was that the greatest city of the
eastern world had never known peace since this young prelate had been its
bishop--Arius persuaded the emperor that he was as orthodox as the best,
and on the strength of a formula drawn up by himself (in which the homo-
ousion did not appear) he was received back into the church, 335. As to the
council, it was held at Tyre, and it deposed Athanasius; and the emperor,
after a personal hearing, banished him to Trier, in Germany, as far almost
as a man could travel from Alexandria and still be in the emperor's
territory. It was now ten years since the farewell ceremonies at Nicaea.
In 336 Arius died, on the eve of a solemn ceremony of rehabilitation
prepared in the cathedral of Constantinople, and in 337 Constantine, too,
died.
Constantine's death brought the Arian party a still greater freedom of
action. He was succeeded by his three young sons as joint emperors, and to
none of these could the upholding of Nicaea be the matter of personal
prestige it was to him. Certain it is that it is from this time that the
party begins to propose alternatives to, or substitutes for, the Nicaean
formula; more or less innocuous substitutes in the first years--had they
not been put out by known opponents of the homo-ousion, and by men who were
the declared foes of the bishop, Athanasius, who had become the very symbol
of all that the categorical test word stood for.
And here it needs to be said that there were many bishops, as little Arian
as Athanasius himself, who, nevertheless, had no love for the famous
Nicaean word--as there had been many such bishops at Nicaea. These Catholic
bishops, supporting the various alternatives of the kind described, played
the Arian game of course, albeit unconsciously. Their dislike of the test
word arose from the fact that, in the East, as has been said already, the
word homo-ousion had a bad history. Its first use, by Clement of Alexandria
and by Origen too (around 230-50), was seemingly in the Nicaean sense; and
when a bishop of Alexandria, answering heretics, seemed to critics so to
defend the distinction of persons in the Holy Trinity, that he obscured the
truth that there is only one God, it was made a point against him that he
had not explicitly said the Logos was homo-ousion with the Father. And this
bishop, Denis, explains to his namesake, the pope, in his defence, why he
had not used the useful word: it was a word nowhere found in Holy
Scripture. This was about the year 257, nearly seventy years earlier than
Nicaea. But eleven years only after this interchange between the two
Denises, when the bishop of Antioch, Paul of Samosata, was condemned (268)
for the heresy of teaching that the Father and the Logos are one person, he
actually used the word homo-ousion to express this oneness, and so his
condemnation gave the word an ill sound in the East.
Whoever first proposed the use of the term at Nicaea, it was surely not any
bishop from the East. To these it stank of heresy, ever since the council
of 268, even when it had, so to speak, been disinfected by the Council of
Nicaea, and given an undoubtedly orthodox employment. Sabellianism, the
denial that there is a Trinity, was the great scare heresy of the East to
the generation upon which Arianism came, and homo-ousion had been the
heresy's shibboleth, in eastern ears.[1]
Again, there is latent a first class difficulty in the Nicaean council's
formal condemnation[2] of those "who say that the Son is of another
hypostasis or ousia [substantia, in Latin] than the Father"; and this was
fully exploited in the troublous years after Constantine's death. The
latent difficulty is that to Greeks these two terms did not necessarily and
always mean exactly the same thing, as they did to Latins. Hypostasis to
the Greeks came to mean what the Latin call "person"; ousia meant "nature"
rather. The sentence "The Son is not of another hypostasis than the
Father," a Greek might take to mean, "Father and Son are one person"; while
the Latin understood by it, "are of the same nature."
All this is set down to convey something of the causes that held quite
orthodox minds in doubt about their practical action during these
controversies--a state of doubt which for years played into the hands of
the radically unorthodox. This was an especially dangerous condition of
things, seeing that it was these radicals--the real Arians--who had the ear
of the court, and who stood to the world of officials and administrators
for the ideal type of Christian believer, the kind that should be
officially supported. For in this first generation that followed the
personal conversion of Constantine, the official world was very far from
being Christianised in belief. Though the emperor, especially after he had
become sole emperor, turned his back very definitely on the pagan rites,
these were by no means forbidden. The whole life of official paganism went
on as before. And the cult of Sol Invictus and Summus Deus still held very
many of its adherents. To these enlightened monotheistic foes of
polytheism, the Arian version of the Christian idea of God naturally
appealed. On a first view it was simpler, more logical--terms meaning just
what they appeared to mean--its language non-mysterious, rational.[3]
It is not, of course, suggested that there was a carefully worked out plan,
in all this, on the part of high officials. But the two tendencies existed
side by side in these years, and it was this accidental coincidence that
did much, so it is suggested,[4] to make Arianism the highly dangerous
threat it proved to be, and to give it a toughness out of all proportion to
the number of its real adherents.
As to its quality as a danger to Catholicism, let Harnack's judgment be
recalled, that Arianism, had it been victorious, must have ruined
Christianity completely, emptying it of all religious content, leaving it a
mere system of cosmology and ethics. It was, in the circumstances, one of
the greatest dangers that true religion has ever had to face, and this
despite the fact that, in the critical fourth century, Arianism was never a
popular thing. "The laity, as a whole, revolted from it in every part of
Christendom. It was an epidemic of the schools and of theologians, and to
them it was mainly confined.... The classes which had furnished martyrs in
the persecutions were in no sense the seat of the heresy."[5]
The only one of Constantine's sons who really favoured the anti-Nicaean
party was Constantius II, and once he became sole master of the empire
(350) the Radicals really threw off the mask, and Arianism proper--the
explicit renunciation of the doctrine that the Logos is truly God--was now
propounded in councils and, with great violence and persecution, imposed by
the emperor. And it was in these years (350-61) that the heresy was first
thrust upon the bishops of the still largely pagan West, of Illyricum,
Italy, and Gaul. In council after council, in the west and in the east,
whether perplexed by the confusion of the issues, whether terrified by the
threats of the emperor and the knowledge that bishops had been murdered who
opposed him, whether overcome by the specious argument that it was all, in
reality, a matter of ridding the Church of Athanasius, "whom they were
taught to consider a restless, violent, party-spirited man, and of his
arbitrary formula"[6]--in council after council the bishops gave way
wholesale, at Arles (353), Milan (355), Sirmium (357), and, most
spectacularly, at the simultaneous councils of Rimini-Seleucia[7] (359)
about the morrow of which St. Jerome wrote a celebrated phrase, that the
whole world woke up one morning, lamenting and marvelling to find itself
Arian.
In 361 Constantius disappeared, baptised (just in time) by an Arian. He was
followed by Julian the Apostate, who set about a systematic revival of
Paganism. Then came Jovian, a Catholic, and after him Valentinian, a
"liberal," with Valens, his brother, co-emperor for the East. Valens (365-
78) a true Arian, of the political type, returned to the policy of
Constantius, and a real persecution of Catholics followed. But the
cloudiness of the early period had been dissipated. The issue was now clear
to the bishops, that only by insistence on the homo-ousion could the Church
rid itself of the crypto-Arians whose influence meant death. And when to
Valens, killed in a war with the Goths (378), a Catholic general, from
Spain, succeeded--Theodosius--the way was at last open to a real
restoration of the traditional belief. Nicaea, for the first time in fifty
years, was to come into full operation in all the sees of the East.
The General Council of 381 is an epilogue to a drama just concluded. It
does little more than register a fait accompli, and its essential
importance is its demonstration to the world that the Christians of the
"East," after more than fifty years of continuous disturbance and of
oppression on the part of their rulers, remain Catholics, are not Arians;
it is a demonstration that the council of Nicaea was no mere ecclesiastical
pageant, but a source of strong and unfailing leadership.
No two general councils follow the same historical pattern--not even when a
bare fifty years separates them, and when the matter of their discussions
is the same. In this council Rome, the West, was not represented at all--
was not so much as invited. The same problems had for years now vexed the
churches of the West. The same political revolution--the appearance of
sovereigns who were wholeheartedly Catholic--was to be their salvation
also. And they, too, demanded a council, and it took place, at Aquileia
some weeks after the council we are dealing with. And why the council which
met at Constantinople came, in after years, to be regarded as a General
Council is something that may puzzle the legists and the theologians.[8]
The bishops who sat in the council were 150 in all. There were none from
Egypt, only half of them from Thrace and Asia. Almost one half of the
bishops came from the vast (civil) diocese called the East, Oriens, whose
chief see was Antioch. And it was the bishop of Antioch, Meletius, who
presided at the council.
Once again the crosscurrents and misunderstandings of these much troubled
years had borne strange fruit. At Antioch there was a rival claimant to the
see, Paulinus. And it was Paulinus whom Rome (and Alexandria also)
recognised as the lawful bishop. But the Catholic East was solidly behind
Meletius, and this meant the support (among others) of the three great
Cappadocian bishops, St. Basil, St. Gregory of Nyssa, his brother, and St.
Gregory of Nazianzen, the greatest theologian of the day and one of the
greatest preachers of all time.[8a]
Meletius died before the council had been long in session, and it was the
last named Gregory who was elected president in his place. The actual
business before the council was slight, and now, with the see of Antioch
vacant and seventy-one bishops of its "jurisdiction" already assembled (to
say nothing of the no less interested eighty bishops from other provinces
), it is not surprising that the question of the successor of Meletius took
the first place in the minds of all. The president of the council had the
happy idea that the bishop whom Rome and Alexandria recognised, Paulinus,
should be chosen, and so the schism be ended. But of this the bishops would
not hear. And then there arrived the bishop of Alexandria himself, the
successor of Athanasius, with some of his suffragans, and he made such a
bitter attack on the president because he had consented, being already
bishop of Sasima, to become bishop of Constantinople,[9] that Gregory,
already discouraged by the revelation of what ecclesiastical politics could
be at a high level, resigned both his see and his presidency.
The council closed on July 9. What it had accomplished was, first, to issue
a statement of belief which explicitly renewed the homo-ousion definition
of Nicaea, and then, naming the many varieties of Arianism, to condemn each
and every one of them as heretical. The bishops next published (what has
long been lost) a detailed statement of their faith in the
consubstantiality of the Divine Logos with the Father, in the distinctness
of the three Persons of the Holy Trinity, and in the reality of the
Incarnation of the Second Person. These statements about belief involved
the condemnation of two other theories related to Arianism, namely, the
denial, by Macedonius and his followers, that the Holy Ghost is really God,
and the theory of Apollinaris, bishop of Laodicaea, that in the Logos
Incarnate--in the God-man, Jesus Christ--the Divine Logos functions in
place of a human soul: Christ, who is truly God, is not truly a man. This
last heresy was to have a famous history in the next seventy years, to be
the occasion of two later General Councils, and, ultimately, in one form or
another, so to divide the Catholics of the East as to paralyse their
resistance to the assault of Islam.
There are four canons enacted by this council.[10] The first is the
declaration renewing the work of Nicaea, and condemning these various
heresies. The second, between the lines of which can be read much of the
history since that council, forbids bishops to cross the frontiers of
another [civil] diocese, or to interfere in another bishop's
administration. The bishop of Alexandria, it is explicitly laid down, is to
confine himself to Egypt; the bishops of the East (i.e., Oriens) shall
confine their joint action to the East, with the reservation that the
bishop of Antioch keeps the rights acknowledged at Nicaea; and statements
no less explicit restrict the bishops of Asia, Pontus, and Thrace to those
three [civil] dioceses, respectively. The bishops are reminded of the
Nicaean rule that the affairs of the sees of any given province are to be
regulated by a twice-yearly meeting of the bishops.
About the time that St. Gregory Nazianzen was invited to become bishop of
Constantinople, the efforts of the bishop of Alexandria, Peter II, had
brought about the "election" of an Alexandrian philosopher, Maximus, and
his unlawful, clandestine consecration. The council (canon 4) now declared
that Maximus was not a bishop, and that whatever ordinations he had ever
performed were worthless, and the candidates "in truth not ordained at
all."
There remains the third canon, the most famous action, in its historical
effects, of this council: "The bishop of Constantinople shall have the
primacy of honour after the bishop of Rome, because [Constantinople] is New
Rome."
NOTES
1. Cf. Newman, Tracts (as before), p. 100 "We cannot be surprised then that
the homoousion, which perplexed the Western bishops, should have irritated
the Orientals, the only wonder is, that East and West had concurred in
accepting it at Nicea."
2. As a conclusion to the creed.
3. See Newman, Tracts (as before), p. 102: "It must be added that to
statesmen, lawyers and military chiefs, who had lately been Pagans, a
religious teaching such as Arianism, which was clear and intelligible, was
more acceptable than doctrines which described the Divine Being in
language, self-contradictory in its letter, and which exacted a belief in
truths which were absolutely above their comprehension."
4. See Msgr. Pierre Batiffol, La Paix Constantinienne et le Catholicisme
(1914), p. 310.
5. Newman, as before, pp. 97-98.
6. Newman, as before, p. 100.
7. Rimini, on the Adriatic coast of Italy, for the bishops of the West;
Seleucia, then the chief city of Isauria, is the modern Turkish port of
Silifke on the Mediterranean.
8. The first stage in the development of its recognition as oecumenical was
the unanimous vote of the General Council of Chalcedon, 4th session (451),
taking as the rule of faith, "that fixed by the council of Nicaea, and
which the 150 bishops of the council assembled at Constantinople by
Theodosius the Great confirmed."
8a. Barry, no. 17, prints a translation of his speech to the council.
9. A breach of the law enacted at Nicaea.
10 Schroeder, op. cit., prints the text and a translation.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Provided Courtesy of:
Eternal Word Television Network
5817 Old Leeds Road
Irondale, AL 35210
www.ewtn.com